HGDC Completed Projects

Everyone--government agencies, private organizations, and individuals--is facing a changing climate: an environment in which it is no longer prudent to follow routines based on past climatic averages. State and local agencies in particular, as well as the federal government, need to consider what they will have to do differently if the 100-year flood arrives every decade or so, if the protected areas for threatened species are no longer habitable, or if a region can expect more frequent and more severe wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, water shortages, or other extreme environmental events. Both conceptually and practically, people and organizations will have to adjust what may be life-long assumptions to meet the potential consequences of climate change. How and where should bridges be built? What zoning rules may need to be changed? How can targets for reduced carbon emissions be met? These and myriad other questions will need to be answered in the coming years and decades.

Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate examines the growing need for climate-related decision support--that is, organized efforts to produce, disseminate, and facilitate the use of data and information in order to improve the quality and efficacy of climate-related decisions. Drawing on evidence from past efforts to organize science for improved decision making, it develops guidance for government agencies and other institutions that will provide or use information for coping with climate change. This volume provides critical analysis of interest to agencies at every level, as well as private organizations that will have to cope with the world's changing climate. Workshop on New Directions in Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation Assessment

Federal agencies have taken steps to include the public in a wide range of environmental decisions. Although some form of public participation is often required by law, agencies usually have broad discretion about the extent of that involvement. Approaches vary widely, from holding public information-gathering meetings to forming advisory groups to actively including citizens in making and implementing decisions.

Proponents of public participation argue that those who must live with the outcome of an environmental decision should have some influence on it. Critics maintain that public participation slows decision making and can lower its quality by including people unfamiliar with the science involved.

This book concludes that, when done correctly, public participation improves the quality of federal agencies' decisions about the environment. Well-managed public involvement also increases the legitimacy of decisions in the eyes of those affected by them, which makes it more likely that the decisions will be implemented effectively. This book recommends that agencies recognize public participation as valuable to their objectives, not just as a formality required by the law. It details principles and approaches agencies can use to successfully involve the public.

With effective climate change mitigation policies still under development, and with even the most aggressive proposals unable to halt climate change immediately, many decision makers are focusing unprecedented attention on the need for strategies to adapt to climate changes that are now unavoidable. The effects of climate change will touch every corner of the world's economies and societies; adaptation is inevitable. The remaining question is to what extent humans will anticipate and reduce undesired consequences of climate change, or postpone response until after climate change impacts have altered ecological and socioeconomic systems so significantly that opportunities for adaptation become limited. This book summarizes a National Research Council workshop at which presentations and discussion identified specific needs associated with this gap between the demand and supply of scientific information about climate change adaptation.

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program is in the process of producing 21 draft assessments that investigate changes in the Earth's climate and related systems. These assessments are designed to inform decision makers about the scientific underpinnings of a range of environmental issues, such as models of past climate conditions. This National Research Council book reviews one of these assessments, Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.3 "Reanalyses of Historical Climate Data for Key Atmospheric Features: Implications for Attribution of Causes of Observed Change." The committee commends the authors for clearly stating their goals and their intended audience and for their fidelity in following the prospectus. However, the current draft needs revision to better link reanalysis and attribution. In addition, the document needs to better explain how reanalysis fits into climate science and include a general description of how climate science is done and how the models, observations, and theories are related to the ultimate goal of reanalysis, especially for the benefit of non-specialists.

This study recommends a definition of decision support that emphasizes communication rather than translation and a strategy by which the small NOAA Sectoral Applications Research program can advance decision support. The book emphasizes that seasonal climate forecasts provide fundamentally new kinds of information and that integrating this information into real-world decisions will require social innovations that are not easily accomplished. It recommends that the program invest in (a) research to identify and foster the innovations needed to make information about climate variability and change more usable in specific sectors, including research on the processes that influence success or failure in the creation of knowledge-action networks for making climate information; (b) workshops to identify, catalyze, and assess the potential of knowledge-action networks in particular resource areas or decision domains; and (c) pilot projects to create or enhance these networks for supporting decisions in climate-affected sectors.

With Precise, accurate spatial information linked to social and behavioral data is revolutionizing social science by opening new questions for investigation and improving understanding of human behavior in its environmental context. Putting People on the Map finds that several technical approaches for making data available while limiting risk have potential, but none is adequate on its own or in combination. This book offers recommendations for education, training, research, and practice to researchers, professional societies, federal agencies, institutional review boards, and data stewards.

With the growing number, complexity, and importance of environmental problems come demands to include a full range of intellectual disciplines and scholarly traditions to help define and eventually manage such problems more effectively. This report is the result of a 2-year effort by 12 social and behavioral scientists, scholars, and practitioners. The report sets research priorities for the social and behavioral sciences as they relate to several different kinds of environmental problems.

This report offers recommendations for future research to improve understanding of how changes in human populations affect the natural environment by means of changes in land use, such as deforestation, urban development, and development of coastal zones. It also features a set of state-of-the-art papers by leading researchers that analyze population-land use environment relationships in urban and rural settings in developed and underdeveloped countries and that show how remote sensing and other observational methods are being applied to these issues. This book will serve as a resource for researchers, research funders, and students.

There is research evidence from both environmental and other behavioral settings that education, information, and voluntary measures can, under appropriate conditions, result in profound changes in individual and organizational behavior. This research suggests that such measures can usefully supplement regulatory and economic instruments in environmental policy. This volume responds to increased interest in policy tools that can supplement traditional regulatory and market-based measures and addresses the questions of how much can be achieved by education, information, and voluntary programs, and of how that potential can best be reached.

"The commons" has long been a pivotal idea in environmental studies, and the resources and institutions described by that term have long been recognized as central to many environmental problems, especially problems of global environmental change. Not only is the topic important in its own right, the commons is also a central theme in studies of international cooperation, environmental decision making, and the design of resource management institutions. This volume is the result of a two-year committee effort. Its thirteen chapters synthesize existing knowledge on key issues in the design of social institutions for managing common-pool resources, raise key issues for further study, and will provide a basis for future research and policy analysis in this area.

The carbon cycle has recently become interesting to policy makers because human activities that release carbon-containing greenhouse gases are the primary source of the threat of global warming. In the United States, the carbon cycle has become a major element of global change research, although so far this effort has not yet integrated the relevant fields of the social and behavioral sciences. This report summarizes a November, 2001 workshop at the National Research Council intended to improve communication between the relevant research communities in the natural and social sciences, leading eventually to an expansion of the carbon cycle program element in directions that would better integrate the two domains.

The workshop focused on a small number of issues that are already recognized as important in the U.S. carbon cycle research program and for which the relevance of the social sciences is readily apparent: (a) the future of fossil fuel consumption; (b) carbon implications of future land use/land cover transformation; and (c) modeling human interactions with the carbon cycle. Workshop participants identified a number of substantive research needs and other activities that they believed would advance knowledge in this field. These included the need to analyze and test assumptions underlying carbon emissions scenarios, to improve understanding of how social and economic forces drive the carbon cycle, and the need to build a long and continuing historical record of human activities shaping the carbon cycle.